Marianne, Wirries

(Germany)

„…Marianne Wirries. I find her works - pigments and chalks on paper - deeply impressive. They feel as if Jackson Pollock all of a sudden discovered Chinese and Japanese painting traditions for himself, and tried to work, full of gestures but at the same time tamed, exploding in being introvert, calmly and focused. The merging of paradoxes, this alliance of antitheses, can also be noticed on other layers. An energetic, boastful stroke meets tender, delicate lines; the colors stay on the one hand vague while on the other hand confidently coming to light. What is more, colors and lines, disegno and coloriti, the two agents declared ancient foes since the Renaissance quarrel between Florence and Venice art schools, are here combined into the most marvelous double.

And so incidentally the painting idioms to be detected in Wirries’ works. Kandinsky’s opinion of Modernism: The ‘big abstract’ versus ‘the big specific’? Maculation with this artist! The titles of two of the paintings, ‘By the Water’ and ‘Winter’, might trigger people to think that this must be landscape art. But what we see represents tangible as well as intangible impressions in equal measures. If one takes a closer look, the question of status is becoming increasingly superfluous. The only thing that remains is to marvel at the skill with which the lines grow from the mere of colors, how forms become clearer, how colors gather strength. It resembles the creation myth; first all is darkness, night and water, then the phenomena break apart, and the world awakes anew to abundance and colorfulness. In Wirries’s winter, spring is already evident.“